Just after Valentine’s Day last month
Jack Singleton
fired off a pot-stirring text to
John Singleton
and his father’s long-time corporate adviser, Mark Carnegie.

One of Singleton junior’s businesses, 1300 Flowers, had cracked its first $1 million sales week and he was crowing. Singleton and Carnegie fired back a line about not realising it was a “real ­business".

It was all in jest but things are brewing in the Singleton camp. In the past two years Jack Singleton – John’s first child – has landed on the boards of most of his father’s investments and ventures. Both say there has not been any discussion about succession, nor any deliberate intent for Jack to take over.

It’s not quite true.

After starting out as a drover on Kerry Packer’s farm in the Hunter Valley, Jack suffered a major shoulder injury which led him to start in the accounts department at his father’s then-burgeoning advertising agency, John Singleton Advertising.

It was before JSA went public. Jack hated accounting and started writing some advertising copy which got him a gig in the creative department at JSA. In early 1995, the two sat down and John asked his son if he wanted to eventually run the business. Jack knocked it back and soon after fled to the US on a holiday and talked his way into an iconic ad agency on Madison Ave in New York, J Walter Thompson.

He returned two years later and started his own ad agency, Jack Watts Currie, in which he remains a partner. It also has a shareholding in the Nudie brand after launching it a decade ago.

Singleton junior has since started or co-founded three other businesses in which he has refused his old man’s investment money – 1300 Flowers, now Australia’s biggest seller of flowers ahead of competitors such as Interflora; Phone Names, which owns the rights to thousands of branded phone numbers like 1300PizzaHut, which it onsells to corporates and; lasttix.com.au, an online website which shifts unsold sporting and entertainment tickets for promoters. Lasttix includes John B Fairfax’s Marinya Media as an investor along with Tony Faure, the former CEO of Ninemsn and Yahoo!

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Singleton junior has no equity or property portfolio – every cent is invested in the businesses he has started or co-founded.

“I would rather back myself rather than some management team I don’t know," he says. “Nothing’s changed. All the money I have got is the money in my bank account, the unit I’m living in and the companies I’m a director in."

But to observers, there appears to be a lot more going on. Jack is 41, John is 71. He’s now on the board of pub investment vehicle Riversdale Group, chaired by former Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon, Macquarie Radio, and most of his father’s other private investments. He’s also still running four of his own businesses – once a month he heads to his 1300Flowers call centre in Brisbane, for example, for an eight-hour shift on the phones. Singleton says he’s cutting it with the best of his team for converting calls to a sale.

“He’s a busy boy," says one of John Singleton’s trusted lieutenants and Macquarie Radio chairman
Russell Tate
. “He’s learning about the businesses that John has and some of them are big ones. Plus he’s running his own. Obviously John wants Jack to get more and more involved in various aspects of his businesses."

But both men are adamant there is no formal plan. “It’s not a succession plan as such," says John Singleton. “It’s just that Jack is a better director than I ever was. He actually reads the words in the back of the annual reports. He decided he didn’t want to work for Daddy 15 years ago but he’s had his adventures. This time it’s just been a natural evolution. I haven’t invested in any of his ideas. They were his and his team’s and he’s built that. My perspective has come from other people. Jack’s has not. I’d say every company I’ve got, public or private, Jack represents me."

Singleton junior points to the investment in Bluetongue beer in 2007 as the first business venture in which he was on “equal footing" with his father.

“I’ve never had a beer I didn’t like but this one was particularly good," he says on dropping his own money into the Bluetongue venture. He admits it ended up being less than lucrative for him and his father because they, unlike other Bluetongue investors, rolled their cash into a joint venture between Coca-Cola and SAB Miller on the basis of an ongoing royalty agreement. “Sadly they’ve let it fall by the wayside," says Jack. “It’s not being promoted like it should be and we’re talking about a beer that had gone from zero to outselling Cascade Premium Lager."

Like his father, Jack Singleton is not short of a word or an opinion. After making his “all beer is good" claim, he qualifies it by dumping on a former client of his ad agency, San Miguel. “It’s probably the worst beer I’ve ever had. People who tasted it would say it was genuinely shithouse."

Singleton junior says he’s not had the succession chat with his father but it’s “probably about time we did".

“There has been zero conscious effort put into any succession plan. It’s been like ‘do you want to get involved in this, yes or no?’ and I guess as I’ve got more experience, I can contribute more so the answer has increasingly been yes," he says. “My strengths are in ideas, marketing, branding and advertising. Operationally I’m useless. I’m no good at human resources. I can’t open an Excel spreadsheet."

Those operating in the Singleton sphere, though, say Jack and his father are in each other’s pockets – they talk and meet with ferocious regularity.

“There wouldn’t be a decision I make without thinking what my old man would do in this situation," says Singleton junior. “Half the time I think about what he would do and I do the opposite and the other half I would do what I think he would have done."